I've felt like a single parent since about Christmas. I think this is when the bulk of my pregnancy, fun yet challenging 2-year-old, and Derrick's renewed dedication to completing his MBA all combined into the perfect storm of solitary parenthood. With his long hours, my increasing exhaustion, and all of the daily routines that make up a stay-at-home-mommy's life, there seems to have been little room for anything but the necessary and the obvious.
Is this how a single parent really feels or am I whinier than I think about my lot in life?? (The one I chose, I remind myself at least twice a month.) Hmmm. My mom raised us alone for quite a while both while married to my air-traffic controller dad and after the divorce. Derrick's mom managed the single parent role for years and years. How did they do it? I'm amazed that it's possible. I laugh at the fantasies I concoct on the long days....or more accurately, the long weeks before Derrick has time to let me out of the house sans sweet baby girl Eliana.
"Oh, gosh!" I think, "Other moms get almost an hour of alone time while they commute back and forth between home and work!!! That would be amazing!!" or "Lunch!! Other people eat lunch with other people...in public!! And don't have to do it around a nap schedule!! That's the coolest!!"
The bedtimes, the naptimes, the three meals a day (with three snacks mixed in for good measure) the picking up, the wiping up, the inevitable messing up. All in a days work. I remember when I had time for pedicures and "2 o'clock meetings" at the movie theater across the street from my office, and blowing out my hair didn't seem like a luxury. But the reward for that career wasn't as great and I remember thinking even then, "When I have kids all of this will be irrelevent." And most of the time...it is. I am grateful for all of the support I have in our friends and family. And yet, when Derrick comes back to me and our family, I look forward to no longer measuring my weeks by his class schedule, but by our little family schedule. We're almost there.
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